Heritage & Culture

A quarantine station, a leper colony, a wartime garrison and finally a political prison, inscribed by UNESCO for what its last chapter came to mean.

The caves northwest of Johannesburg where the fossil record of our own origins is densest, inscribed by UNESCO as the Fossil Hominid Sites of South Africa.

A kingdom on the Limpopo that traded gold for Chinese porcelain, ruled for four centuries, and was then written out of the country's own history.

Built in 1593 to take the Indian Ocean trade routes, and fought over for three centuries. What stands at Mombasa now, and how to visit it.

A Swahili city of the tenth to seventeenth centuries, abandoned and swallowed by forest. Inscribed only in 2024, and still barely visited.

UNESCO calls the coastal castles the starting point of the African diaspora. What a journey of return to Ghana involves, and what it asks.

Jollof, banku, waakye and kelewele. The staples worth knowing, how street food actually works, and what to ask for if you avoid chilli.

The largest of Ghana’s coastal castles, a World Heritage Site and a working museum. What stands there now, and how to visit it properly.

Begun in 1482, St. George’s d’Elmina is one of the oldest European buildings outside Europe. What survives there, and how to visit it.

The last bath before the coast. Assin Manso was a great inland slave market, and is now a place of return, of reburial and of quiet.

Greetings are not optional in Kenya, and the coast has its own rules. What to say, what to wear, and when not to take the photograph.

The oldest and best preserved Swahili settlement in East Africa, lived in for over seven hundred years. What to see, and the advisory that surrounds it.